Replicating nature's fabric: High information markets and the sustainability of global seafood

Abstract

Global fisheries and seafood supply chains have remarkable structural similarities to nature's food webs, with humans as apex predators, allowing us to use ecological concepts to draw connections between fisheries management and the stability and resilience of the global seafood system. However, misinformation currently plagues the global seafood market and may be preventing food webs' natural stabilizing features from working properly in the seafood system. We argue that misinformation blocks transparency throughout the entire supply chain and prevents consumers from making informed and potentially stabilizing decisions, undermining the sustainability of the global seafood system. Here, we first describe how food webs contain a remarkably repeated generalist module, characterized by flexible mobile generalist predators that adapt to resource variability in space by making rapid and “informed” foraging switches. Next, we discuss how the global seafood system mimics this structure but opposes the common stabilizing mechanism of nature's food webs because it is replete with misinformation. We conclude that modern tools combined with proper labelling can help create high information markets that allow consumers to make rapid and informed decisions. Predators' roles in nature's food webs indicate that smart switches in consumer foraging (i.e., demand) are critical for global seafood sustainability and the maintenance of marine biodiversity.